grandma passing essay

The Death of My Grandmother and Lessons Learnt Essay

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Introduction

For many people, the death of their grandparents means the loss of a very close relative, who was given an important role in their lives. After the death of a grandmother, a person can experience many different emotions. The loss of a dear person is frightening and unsettling. Often the loss of a grandmother is the first loss in life, which only complicates the feelings experienced. Death is a natural part of life that we have to deal with sooner or later. The loss of my grandmother was the biggest tragedy that has happened to me. The main reason is the fact that she was the one who raised me to become who I am. She was closer to me than my parents because they were mostly busy at their jobs. My grandmother always accompanied me throughout my childhood.

Nonetheless, the given obstacle was a mere setback for my future success. At first, I was inclined to be pessimistic and depressed due to the fact that I did not see myself enjoying life anymore. As time passed, I began to realize that I am the only one who can and will carry on her legacy and memory because she raised me by pouring her soul into me. In addition, I started to appreciate life more because I faced the concept of death early on.

I learned many valuable things after my grandmother passed away. The best way to feel better after the death of a loved one is to indulge in pleasant memories. I tried to remember the moments when we laughed together, had fun, or other pleasant situations that we experienced with my grandmother. Also, over time, I could revise our box or album of memory, so as not to forget about all the moments experienced. I realized that if you focus on helping others, it will be easier for you to survive the loss and move on. It is also critical to support the parents and brothers during difficult moments. Some of your parents have lost their mother, and this is a terrible obstacle. I learned to recall that I love my loved ones and try to take care of them even in small endeavors, such as offering to make tea or washing the dishes. It is important to experience the joy that my grandmother lives in my memory.

Furthermore, I learned that there are several stages that each person experiencing loss goes through shock, anger, despair, and acceptance. As a rule, these stages take a year, and it is no accident that in the old traditions, the mourning for the deceased lasted as long. These experiences are individual and depend on the degree of closeness with the deceased person, on the circumstances in which he passed away. At each stage, there may be experiences that seem abnormal to people. For example, they hear the voice of a deceased person or feel his presence. They may remember the departed, dream about him, may even be angry with the deceased, or, conversely, not experience any emotion. These conditions are natural and are due to the functioning of the brain. However, it is important to know that pathological reactions to stress can occur at each stage.

In conclusion, I firmly believe that the loss of my grandmother was a major challenge that I faced in my entire life. Although it dealt irreparable damage, I am convinced that it made me much stronger as a human being both emotionally and mentally. I acquired a certain degree of peace and calmness during stressful periods because none of them can be as painful as the loss of my grandmother. In addition, I became more aware of the concept of death, which forced me to fully appreciate my time and life.

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Here’s to the grandmothers who have shaped generations of women and mothers

AlessandroBiascioli/Shutterstock

In light of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, I am reminded of the passing of my own grandmother and the importance of grandmothers all across the globe.

By Mariah Maddox September 12, 2022

The loss of a grandmother is never an easy one to deal with. In light of the death of Queen Elizabeth II , I am reminded of the passing of my own grandmother and the importance of grandmothers all across the globe. 

In many ways, I still have not found rest in the fact that my grandmother is gone—and for people who have lost their grandmothers, I’m sure you can relate.

Related: How to deal with loss of grandmother

I saw how deeply many across the world began to mourn when Queen Elizabeth II passed away—and in a way, it resurfaced the ache of the loss of my own grandmother that I have been trying to avoid for so long.

The world seemingly stops for just a moment when the matriarch of our family passes. And when it starts to move again, it never orbits the same.

It’s as if I have tried and tried to regain my footing after her loss. Yet the grief fills and surrounds me —and I have never been the same. The world has never been the same.

Because grandmothers are the anchors of families. They are the ones who hold everything together, who remind us of the names that we carry and of where we come from.

Grandmothers are the ones who make us draw near to our lineage and find glory in the blood that runs through our veins. They keep family at the center of their lives—and their hearts—and stand true to the precious and cherished bonds of kin. 

Related: I love seeing my child develop personal relationships with family members

The love that grandmothers hold is deeper and fuller than anything we have ever known—and we are drawn into their orbit of love, laughter and light.

So when we lose a grandmother, it feels like we lose a monumental piece of ourselves. The world seemingly stops for just a moment when the matriarch of our family passes. And when it starts to move again, it never orbits the same.

But the reassuring and warming thing for me is that I get to honor my grandmother in living the wisdom she so often instilled in me. In her days on this Earth, she lived a full and meaningful life.

Related: Our kids have the best Nana and Grandma in the world—thank you

Every day I am reminded of her embrace, of her grace and her beauty and her poise.

I am reminded of how her aura warmed every person that she came in contact with and how her presence commanded every space that she walked into. 

She walked the path before us—my mother, my aunts, my sisters, me—and she reached back to guide us on our individual journeys. In many ways, her spirit still guides us.

Even though their passings bring an unbearable burden of grief, we now have the baton to carry.

And I know that one day, I want to be that woman. The matriarch of my family. The woman who my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren come to seek wisdom from. The woman who reminds them of their lineage, of their purpose. 

One day, I will be that woman, and I am sure of it because my grandmother taught me so many valuable things. And though I have spent many days in mourning since her passing, I am reminded of the morning she carried all the days of her life. Those recollections ease my weeping heart in times like these and remind me that there is still work to be done. Now a deeper purpose is awaiting me—and that is to carry on the legacy that my grandmother sowed into all the women that she raised.

Related: Being a grandmother is the greatest joy of my life

So if you are reading this, take a moment to honor your grandmother—living or passed away. Honor the grandmothers who gave us our heritage. Honor the grandmothers who sacrificed so that we could be the women we are today. Honor the grandmothers who walked the path before us. Honor the grandmothers who are the glue that binds us all together.

A coworker of mine mentioned the loss of a grandmother as the sentiment of a loss of generations of elders, of a moving up of generations. And I find that sentiment to be achingly true, but also reassuring.

Because grandmothers have shaped generations of women and mothers—and even though their passings bring an unbearable burden of grief, we now have the baton to carry.

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Reflections on the Death of a Loved One

Table of contents, introduction, the shock and sorrow: initial reactions to the death of a loved one, the process of grief: navigating life after loss, life lessons from death: a new perspective, works cited.

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How I Learned to Love My Granddaughter Without Fear

T he phone call from my daughter in North Carolina came at six o’clock in the morning, unusually early for her. “I’m pregnant,” Maggie announced, her voice bubbling with delight.

From 1,600 miles away I put down my mug of smoky dark-roast coffee and gave a shout. Her news was the last thing I would have expected as I sat in my rented house in Albuquerque, watching roadrunners skitter over the xeriscaping in the front yard, stabbing at the dried mealworms I’d just put out for them. 

Maggie and her husband, Jimmy, together for 11 years and married for eight, had been on the fence about having children. Four years into their marriage, they decided to try for a baby. But after years passed, they both assumed and then accepted it wasn’t going to happen.

Read More: What My Family Taught Me About Loneliness

I’d looked on with a mixture of curiosity and a small bit of envy as friends welcomed one grandchild after another. My oldest son, Liam, in his early 40s, was at the time unattached. I’d resigned myself to the possibility of never knowing that particular brand of joy, although I also couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually be someone’s grandmother.

And yet, here I was, trying to wrap my head around the idea. I walked through the house, my brindle Boxer dogging my footsteps as I did a quick inventory of room after room. In the next couple of days, I began packing up my belongings and arranging for housing with dear friends back home. 

During one of our phone calls, my daughter had asked, “What do you want your grandmother name to be?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” I confessed. 

Meanwhile, I worked to tamp down a rising anxiety. My second child, Cooper, had been born 40 years ago with a heart defect. When he was 4 days old, he had closed-heart surgery to repair a coarctation of the aorta. What we didn’t know — what no one could have known then, with limited ability to see inside an infant’s heart — was there were other, more deadly defects hidden within, two holes in the wall separating the atria. When he was 6 weeks old, he died quietly at home in my arms as I held and rocked him, unaware he was slipping away from me.

Read More: I Got Divorced. But My Family Is Still Whole

When Cooper died, Liam was 2 1/2. To say I became an overly anxious mother would be an understatement. I monitored every bump and bruise, each sniffle and fever. Nightmares of childhood cancer and other life-threatening illnesses pushed their way into everyday activities. After all, I now knew that the worst was possible. 

Then I became pregnant again. After Maggie was born, I slept with her on my stomach most nights, and when she finally transitioned to a crib, I’d go into her room in the morning, half-expecting to find she’d died.

The grip on my heart gradually released, though, as my healthy children grew into their wonderful selves with nothing more than the usual list of childhood maladies and injuries. And now here was my baby having a baby. My emotions roiled with wonder and excitement, but all of it was overshadowed by a deep, resonating dread.

My daughter sent me the first ultrasound photos of “Little Bean,” a nickname they’d given in the earliest days when a pregnancy app indicated the developing clump of cells was the size of a vanilla bean.

I peered at the mottled, blurry image of my grandchild at 8 weeks gestation. “What am I seeing?” I asked.

“Here,” she texted and sent a second photo, this one with a red arrow pointing to a small darkish blob with a hazy dot in it like a dandelion tuft. “The brighter spot is the heart,” she wrote.

I peered at the picture, trying to imagine the fuzzy image as a beating heart. Something in me broke open, then just as quickly slammed shut. 

Some years before, during my tenure at the domestic-violence and rape crisis agency, a co-worker had asked if I’d mind holding her newborn while she attended a short meeting. I happily took her baby boy in my arms, cooing and grinning at him, and brought him into my office. Sinking into the chair, the first thing I did was check to make sure he was breathing, as easily as one might check to make sure his socks were still on. Hot tears of sorrow and anger spilled down my cheeks at my automatic reaction to holding an infant. 

This is how trauma lives in the body, tentacled through our sense memory. So much of the terrible night my son died remains a blur. What I have recalled all too well is the cold stillness, the weight of his tiny form, and the shock of him being so utterly gone.

Little Bean turned out to be a girl and with the given name June. All ultrasounds and other tests revealed her to be developing as she should. But I couldn’t shake the sense of dread.

“So much could go wrong,” I worried aloud to a friend.

“And so much could go right,” was her loving response.

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Maggie was induced early one morning, and labor progressed slowly over the course of the day. At 9:37 that night I witnessed the moment my daughter pushed her baby girl into the world, a 7 ½-lb. miracle with downy dark hair and an adorable button nose. My son-in-law said I should do the honors — the obstetrician handed me the scissors, and I cut the cord, severing June from the warm, liquid world of her mother’s womb, and officially welcoming her Earthside.

But after her first breath, the newborn cry, that plaintive, sharp wail all parents wait for, didn’t come. The nurses took June from my daughter’s arms and continued to rub and stimulate her as she blinked in the glare of the bright room, but her blood oxygen levels remained concerningly low.

“We’re going to take her to the nursery,” one of the nurses said. My son-in-law followed. My daughter, unable to leave the bed because of the epidural, looked at me from across the room.

A chest X-ray confirmed a suspected pneumothorax, a condition in which air leaks into the space between the lung and the chest. Because we live in a small town with a small hospital, June would need to be transported to an NICU an hour and a half away. Watching my daughter and son-in-law say a tearful goodbye to their newborn was one of the most wrenching scenes I’ve ever witnessed. The next morning my daughter was discharged, and I drove her to see her baby girl at the hospital where my son-in-law already was.

The neonatal specialist assured them that the small hole in her lung would likely heal on its own, and three days later they brought June home. “Just forget this happened,” the doctor said. All signs pointed to complete health.

But I was in a tailspin that I couldn’t seem to pull out of. 

Those first weeks I’d come to their house on Friday, taking charge of June at midnight after my daughter nursed her, and giving her the 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. bottles, watching her mouth as she suckled, stroking her soft skin. Did I feel like her grandmother? I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel. Friends had described a dizzying happiness at being “in the best club ever.”

What I felt too much of was terror, deathly afraid of the small bundle I held, continually monitoring her rosebud lips for signs of a bluish tint, watching to make sure her chest was rising and falling, panicking when it seemed too long between breaths. The urge to tumble helplessly in love with my granddaughter was in full battle with the freshly resurfaced memories of the night my son died. I kept my fears to myself, not wanting to foist my unease on my already traumatized daughter and son-in-law, who were struggling to return to the normalcy of welcoming this new baby into their lives after her scary start. 

One afternoon, talking on the phone with a friend while driving in town, I heard myself say, “The doctors assured them the hole in her heart would heal.” There was a stunned silence as I realized what I’d said. “I mean her lung,” I said and hung up, pulling into a grocery-store parking lot where I sat with my face in my hands, weeping. In that moment, I knew I had a choice — release the dark grief or risk missing one of the most light-filled times of my life. 

“That was that baby,” I told myself. “This baby doesn’t have any holes in her heart. This baby is fine.” I offered myself a mantra to try. “That was then, this is now.” Whenever the old trepidation would rise, I’d repeat the words, reminding myself of the distance in years and reality between the death of my son and the life of this sweet, healthy baby girl. Gradually, my heart unwound.

One afternoon, while my daughter napped in the next room, I snuggled little June close and rocked her. I leaned down to listen to the sound of her quiet breathing, this time not from fear but wonder. She looked up at me with deep blue eyes rimmed with dark lashes and stared as if memorizing my face. Unable to look away, I let her hold me in the power of her wide-open gaze.

“The brighter spot is the heart,” my daughter had written to me all those months ago, and now baby June and I sat basking in the light of a love big enough to hold it all — yesterday’s grief, today’s joy, and all the beautiful and uncertain tomorrows. 

Outside, a soft breeze blew, and a shard of sunlight shot through the trees. I kissed my granddaughter’s forehead and began to sing.

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The Dead Grandmother Essay

By Erik Anderson Winter 2019 | Nonfiction

In my line of work, I meet a lot of dead grandmothers. Mostly they’re saintly, but occasionally they’re late to parties. Sometimes they’re self-absorbed or frivolous or extraneous or a burden. But whether revered or resented, it’s always a wretched experience to recall their turkey meatballs or sympathetic ears, to wade through the muck of what one should have said or done before it was too late.

The Dead Grandmother Essay is a subgenre of its own, an outgrowth of a creative writing classroom in which I encourage students to write about things that matter to them at a time in their lives when many are not entirely sure what does. The Dead Grandmother Essay offers a way to strike some deep notes, to practice gravity without succumbing to it. The Dead Grandmother was bound to die, after all, and in that way is not at all like The Dead Mother or Father, who elicits an entirely different kind of essay. The Dead Grandmother is usually safe in a way that the Dead Mother or Father is not, but it is also this safety—the remove from any immediate vulnerability—that means the Dead Grandmother will primarily be an exercise, a vehicle for testing certain registers, to see how they align with your range. Sometimes the product is moving, but more often it tries to be moving and fails.

Failure isn’t such a bad thing, however, and because the student writer is learning her craft, because few students have hitched their lives to writing, the stakes of failure are usually low. Causing a disinterested reader to care about the qualities of your Dead Grandmother’s macaroni salad, moreover, or failing to, doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to bring a reader to care about other things in the future. Writing, like all art, is practical: you learn, or don’t learn, by doing.

For my part, I much prefer The Dead Grandmother Essay to some of its fellows. Consider the Big Game Essay, in which a young person recounts the glories of winning the state championship, learning to love squash, or walking on to the college’s field hockey team. These essays may have all of the commas in the right places, they may even have a compelling structure, but they rarely intrigue and, injuries notwithstanding, they never bruise. The narrating persona is generally the hero of the Big Game Essay, and conflict tends to be situational. The stakes may seem to be high, but the Big Game Essay erects an almost insurmountable barrier between the reader and the writer’s vulnerabilities. The centrality of a ball, even when it’s shaped liked a puck, is a giveaway: we are in diversionary territory. Life happens outside of the marked field or court, not within it, and so it’s difficult for such essays to channel or simulate necessity in the manner of the Dead Grandmother.

Because the point of The Dead Grandmother Essay isn’t the Dead Grandmother, it doesn’t actually need to be about a Dead Grandmother, much less a Dead Grandfather, although it needs to take place in her vicinity in ways that the Dead Father or Big Game Essays do not: close, but not too close, to the bone. It probably goes without saying that The Dead Grandmother Essay doesn’t even need to be an essay. I’m certain that fiction writers and poets are aware of corresponding, genre-specific versions. Many, if not most, writing students have to produce a version of The Dead Grandmother Essay. It’s almost a rite of passage.

Born in 1931, my own grandmother recently turned eighty-eight, but she had spent much of the previous year in and out of the hospital. She has a thirty-year-old artificial heart valve that should have failed years ago. The blood thinners she takes to keep her body functioning have complicated her chronic diverticulitis, leading to a couple of episodes in which it appeared she might bleed out through her rectum. Aging is one thing, but old age is another, and as my parents report from their home in Michigan, having just returned from another visit to the emergency room, my grandmother is a very old woman.

Her death, when it comes, will be a mixed blessing. She has had a difficult, in many ways unenviable life, and her relationship with my parents, her primary caregivers, has often been strained. And yet for all of us her death will represent the end of a generation, the last of a set of old bulwarks against time. Her death will mean that my own parents, along with the entire boomer generation, will now be on the frontlines. Barring any unforeseen catastrophes, they will be the next to go. My proximity to death may seem to increase, or accelerate.

My grandmother has done many of the things one expects of grandmothers. She has made me meals I didn’t particularly enjoy before sending me home with leftovers. She has given me token amounts of money at irregular intervals. As a kid, I remember her hosting my brother and me while our parents went away, and I remember these visits, perhaps unfairly, as frosty. I will likely remember her, on balance, as a cold person, bitter and ungenerous. I don’t relish that admission, but it would be untrue to pretend my experience of her was something it wasn’t. She has often been unkind and manipulative, and after she has died I won’t be able to wash that impression from my mind.

For most people in her life, she has been difficult to love. She and my grandfather were married, to each other, three times over the course of their lives together, and much of my father’s particular blend of neuroses was forged during those years when, as a small child, the family was careening from one fight to the next. My own Dead Grandmother Essay, were I to write one, would require me to situate my grandmother’s life in my own, to identify the through line that connects those fights to the sense of inadequacy that accompanied me from childhood to middle age. My Dead Grandmother Essay would have to establish my feelings for her in the feelings I received from her, however indirectly. In order to speak about her, and about her death, I would first need to identify which parts of myself were affected.

This is the lesson of Vivian Gornick’s essential book, The Situation and the Story : to know why you’re speaking you must know who is speaking. I’m not sure the who always comes before the why , that persona always precedes purpose, but I think Gornick is right that the two are connected. To know why my grandmother’s death might affect me, I need to know who I am in relation to her, and it’s also true that to know who I am, I need to know why she matters. It’s more of a dance than cause and effect.

But this is a Dying Grandmother Essay, not a Dead Grandmother Essay. She remains a moving target, one I have loved with filial affection, in spite of her flaws. She is an active presence in whom I see many of the traits she passed down to my father. He has her eyes, for instance, and as he ages I see, far more than his father’s, dead for most of my life, her face in his. Like her, he has always been sharp-witted and perceptive. Her speech, like his, and like mine, sometimes conceals subtle barbs. All of us are, to varying degrees, both pleasant and prickly, although we hide the latter well.

And therein lies the dilemma: a dying grandmother is not as safe as a dead one. There are risks involved in writing about her. It’s unlikely she will ever read this essay, but theoretically she could, as could my father, whom I have unflatteringly compared to his mother. Either could take offense. Feelings could be hurt. Ties could fray. And for me there’s always the danger of recognizing something in myself I don’t want to see, some tendency that marks me as one of them, perhaps a worse version. For surely neither would be as callous and untoward as to take as a subject, almost facetiously, the impending death of a family member. Neither would be as mercenary and cynical.

Such risks are generally missing from the Dead Grandmother Essay. It isn’t true that the dead can’t hurt us, but it is true that we can’t hurt them. In speaking about them, we are never speaking to them. We shout or whisper as into a void.

The possibility of damage is almost a precondition of creation, which isn’t the same as saying that damage is an inevitable outcome, nor that benefits are directly proportional to risks, some of which, I would argue, aren’t worth taking—the costs would be too much, socially or psychologically. The thing the Dead Grandmother cannot teach you, even if it sets you on your way to learning it, is the difference between the risks worth taking and the risks not worth taking.

The writer’s work, James Baldwin argues, must be unconcerned with personal advantage. Or, as I once heard Kristin Dombek say, we cannot be the heroes of our own essays. The truth, Baldwin writes, “ is a two-edged sword—and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud.”

Beginning writers are almost never willing to die on the sword of their truths, nor should they be. There will be plenty of time for that later, when they’ve assembled enough self to withstand the effects. The process of producing one’s first efforts as a writer, especially in the context of a classroom, is often delusional and fraudulent and even self-gratifying. It’s rarely wicked or treacherous, though. As a fantasy, it’s productive and pedagogical: imagine you were writing your truth—what would that look like? What subjects would it involve, what stories? From which aspects of your life would it proceed?

At the moment my grandmother lives on the top floor of an old hotel built in 1925 and converted into a retirement home a half-century later. When I visited my parents a few weeks back, she asked over dinner to come to church with me the following day to hear my parents sing in the choir. She wanted to spend time together, she said, and afterward we could all have lunch at the hospital cafeteria, where the three of them apparently like to go. It’s quiet, they said, and has a good salad bar.

I hadn’t been to a service in maybe fifteen years, and my grandmother—despite her fondness for my parents’ lesbian minister—has always been skeptical of the Episcopalian tradition, so the two of us sat in the last pew, observing more than participating. Neither of us wanted to partake in communion, and kneeling would have been out of the question for her. But at one point she turned to ask whether I attended church at home, and when I said I didn’t she asked, either out of curiosity or concern, whether I had faith. I gave a verbal shrug, something like an eh pressed through clenched teeth. I’d so enjoyed her company the night before, drinking wine and laughing about the cafeteria—which I vetoed, incidentally—that I’d forgotten she knew how to shame, as do I.

After church, we ate sandwiches in her apartment, in which all signs of the old hotel had been renovated out of recognition. We drank premixed margaritas, and the flowers I’d brought for her birthday—the purples and pinks she prefers—sat in a vase on the counter. Would this be the last time I saw her, I wondered, as I’ve wondered each time I’ve seen her in recent years. And what sort of grandson had I been? I had never felt it necessary to fill the holes in her life, to give her, except in small doses, the love she feels the world has denied her. I accepted long ago the notion that she would die a lonely, unhappy death, and that this has been at least partially her fault. She has always seemed tragic to me in ways she has cultivated but also been oblivious to. I don’t envy her, but I suspect she means more to me in life than she ever will in death.

As I hugged her that day, her body was frail, her embrace weak, but she filled my pockets with miniature candy bars I wouldn’t eat. We would be back next summer, I said—we would see her then. I didn’t know if it was true.

Erik Anderson is the author of four books of nonfiction, including BIRD , forthcoming from Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in March 2020. He teaches creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College, where from 2014-2019 he directed the annual Emerging Writers Festival.

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What My Grandmother Knew About Dying

There are essentially two kinds of physicians: those who want to fix things and those who want to help people deal with things that can’t be fixed. I became a geriatrician and palliative-care doctor because I like being with people when the hard stuff goes down. I like organizing a plan, untangling the knot of someone’s suffering even just a bit. I like having something to offer.

What I understood after a few years of taking care of the very sick and dying is that most people can’t say what they want or what they care about when they’re nearing the end: they’re overwhelmed, or in pain, or delirious. If you’re going to be useful to someone in that moment, it’s best if you’ve talked beforehand about what might happen. I learned to gently engage people in picturing their own decline and near-demise, and to ask what would be most important to them in those moments. Would they want to die at home, receive CPR, have a feeding tube? Would they prefer to be with certain people, to be blessed with certain prayers, to listen to a specific song?

I’ve been with families for some very nice deaths, planned to perfection like weddings. One older woman I adored, whom I’ll call Ellen, died at home, surrounded by roses, dressed in a fur coat—ideal. I felt good about how clear and firm I had been in articulating the reality of Ellen’s prognosis, and proud of the things that her daughters and I arranged to make her final weeks meaningful and comfortable: manicures, favorite movies, photo albums, and opioids. Ellen got it all because she didn’t shrink from existential distress. She died having told all her grandchildren that she loved them, in letters that she took the time to write and leave in envelopes in her desk.

In my family, it’s different. No one has shared a vision for the end of their lives, or written a living will. I’ve failed entirely to get conversations about these things going—partly for the same reasons that surgeons don’t operate on their loved ones, but largely because, in my family, there is a staunch refusal to acknowledge the mortal coil. My close relatives barely acknowledge having bodies. When felled by illness in various ways, they’re mystified but incurious, irritated but not despairing, and in utter disbelief that things can really go south.

My grandmother, Harriet, became engaged to my grandfather, Lou, after they’d dated for two weeks. Whenever anyone asked how she knew, she would say, “He was a hunk.” Lou was frequently ill and died at fifty-seven. I didn’t know Harriet then and can’t picture her grief, but she never dated anyone after him. She would speak of him with a very specific tenderness that conveyed, every time, that he was the love of her life.

She and Lou raised three kids in Toronto from the fifties to the seventies. When her kids were in their teens, she became obsessed with West Highland terriers, jaunty little white dogs. She had them first as pets, then became a breeder, and then got on the dog-show circuit, as a contender and a judge. When I was very little, she had a kennel in her basement, with puppies barking in pens. I could tug ropes on a pulley system to open the doors of the enclosures and let the terriers run free behind her house.

When she was in her mid-sixties, Harriet said enough with the dogs and decided to pursue acting. This wasn’t a hobby for her; it was a vocation, a dream she’d harbored since high school. She got an agent and started going to auditions. She was in several commercials and plays, and she has a reel on YouTube. Was she good? I honestly have no idea. Onstage, she always seemed so much like herself to me: robust, dramatic, annoying, self-involved, charismatic, loving. She took her jobs seriously and fretted when they dried up. She wanted to get cast enough times to qualify for a Canadian Actors’ Guild membership, and, eventually, she did.

About a decade ago, when she was eighty-four, Harriet was hospitalized for an elective procedure and suffered a string of serious complications. I flew home to see her in the intensive-care unit, where she was sitting with a non-invasive ventilation mask covering her face and forcing oxygen into her body. Many older patients in this situation become delirious, or at least anxious and scared. Not my grandmother. As I leaned in to take her hand, she pulled the mask away from her face with surprising strength and said, “Can you believe I’m in here? I was up for a part in ‘Dumb and Dumber 2.’ ”

That hospitalization lasted several weeks. Then Harriet recovered. She kept living alone. She seemed to be evading death by simply refusing to acknowledge its possibility. When I would visit, she would roll her eyes and say things like “Getting old is no fun, kiddo!” She would ask for my professional input as a physician into her various ailments, but then beam throughout my replies and listen to none of it. Her primary-care physician was old, too, and she felt that he was a very good doctor, but this was mostly because he always called on her birthday.

Most illness is experienced as a scatterplot of symptoms and challenges, not as a straight and sudden decline. This is what makes prognostication difficult and caretaking so gruelling: in addition to being sad, expensive, and exhausting, being responsible for a sick or aging loved one is also unpredictable. Our minds play tricks on us, so that signs of degeneration can go unnoticed for years and then come into focus as harbingers of doom. There are good days and bad ones, but it’s most important to keep your eye on the slope of the curve.

For a long while, Harriet’s curve was bending downward. She spent the pandemic in her apartment in Toronto, mostly alone. She relied on oxygen at night and sometimes during the day. She was also lucid, mentally energetic, and blessedly tech-savvy. She subsisted largely on maple cookies and crackers with marmalade. She was doing O.K., until she wasn’t.

At the end of January, Harriet was admitted to the hospital with new shortness of breath, initially attributed to an exacerbation of a chronic lung issue and a mild pneumonia. After a few days, she developed an internal bleed, and her blood count remained stubbornly low even after it was addressed. She needed blood transfusions as a result, and then diuresis so that her stiff heart would be able to handle the additional fluid.

The essence of geriatric medicine is the anticipation of cascading health problems like the ones that Harriet was facing. “Frail” is a colloquial term used to describe little old ladies, but frailty is also a clinical syndrome that affects more than just our bones and muscles. With time and stress, our internal organs and biological systems become worn, brittle, less resilient to infections and injuries, more susceptible to toxicities. Sick bodies usually have multiple problems, and, over time, these problems become intertwined. Heart failure leads to kidney failure, which worsens the heart failure, which makes breathing feel more labored. A mind that’s slipping away might mean that a person forgets how to provide their own basic hygiene, gets new infections, takes antibiotics, and becomes more confused from the medication’s side effects. When people speak of “dying of old age,” this type of spiral is usually what they mean. Aging alone doesn’t kill us.

After a week in the hospital, Harriet was too weak to sit up on the side of her bed. On the phone, her voice sounded faint and slow. My mother couldn’t visit her because of isolation protocols, and the hospital was stretched for staffing. As the days went on, I became more anxious not just that we might lose her but that we might lose her inside, alone, away from us. Her doctors kept looking for ways to fix her. I felt that I could see the big picture better than they could. She wasn’t going to be easily fixed, and I wanted to get her home.

I tried, with little success, to get Harriet to tell me what she wanted. Midway through her hospitalization, we discussed the prospect of a colonoscopy, which her doctors had proposed to look for another source of the bleeding. I thought the rationale for something so invasive was dubious, and that the potential complications were a clear reason to decline. Harriet wouldn’t say no, but she also wasn’t saying, as some of my patients have in the past, that she wanted to “do everything.” Instead she said she’d think about it, and asked how my baby was doing. “ Thank you for calling, my darling,” she said in her diminished voice, as we got off the phone.

Technically, Harriet’s attitude is called denial. But denial was one of her best survival strategies, a way of having a fine time even when things were not fine at all. This was a woman who loved being alive, even as her life became more constrained. Alone in the hospital, miserable, sleepless, barely eating, bruised and bleeding, she behaved as though she were merely unhappy, jet-lagged on a layover. Her will to live was primal and powerful. She was lucid through everything. She was a complete miracle in this way: her brain never got cloudy, because it refused to track the weather of her body.

At the end of the second week of Harriet’s hospitalization, my extended family met on Zoom to talk about bringing her home. She had received many medical interventions in the past ten days, but she was also worse than she had been upon entering the hospital in the first place. Twelve people representing two generations, ages twenty-nine to seventy, were on the call. Some were in Israel, some in the United States, some in Canada. A few of my cousins had been in touch with my grandmother every day for years, and her absence from the grid of faces was discomforting. No one wanted to have a meeting about Harriet without Harriet.

Family meetings are considered the palliative-care practitioner’s core procedure. An experienced facilitator listens more than she talks, and then summarizes, clarifies, and organizes; her job isn’t to tell the family what to do, but to help them articulate it for themselves. I forgot all my practiced communication techniques when speaking to my own family members, tripped up by my intimacy with the patient and with them. I monologued, with pauses for questions. I explained Harriet’s medical situation and emphasized that her doctors hadn’t found much that they could treat to cure. I talked about bringing her home to take care of her in the most essential sense: to feed her the soup she wanted from a specific Jewish restaurant, to cajole her into taking bites. I said we could always change our minds if things got much worse or much better. I didn’t know how long she had, but didn’t we want to be with her while we could? Everyone agreed that we did, not because I’d demonstrated skill in guiding them toward that decision, but because we all loved the same dynamic, maddening woman in the same devoted way. I booked a flight to Toronto that day.

The beautiful death at home —with luxuries, like roses or furs, or simply in comfort and safety—is hard to come by, even for those who want it. It’s almost impossible for people who do not have family or friends who can devote significant time and resources to caring for them; it’s completely impossible for people who do not have homes. It’s sometimes impossible for reasons related to the dying process itself: a person can be suffering too much to be treated safely at home, or need the attention of more people than a family can afford to have at the bedside. In the U.S., if you elect to enroll in home hospice, you typically must forgo any interventions that are considered disease-modifying or life-extending. This is a choice forced by health-care economics and reductive ideas about the line between living and dying. Practically, it means that people delay preparing for death at home so they can continue to receive physical therapy, or try one more round of chemo.

Harriet, in her refusal to engage with goals of care, hadn’t articulated a wish for the beautiful death at home. Nonetheless, I hoped one was possible. She was dwindling, not suffering. We had plenty of family around interested in taking part in her care. Her apartment could be reconfigured to accommodate new ways of living. We could afford to supplement the services provided by Ontario’s public-insurance benefits, which are more flexible and generous than what one typically gets in the U.S., and we had a network of contacts who could help us get what we needed even in the midst of the pandemic. Still, it took days to organize the hospital bed, the commode, the aides who would teach us to care for her body, the referrals from social work, the prescriptions, the appointments. During that time, Harriet remained in the hospital, getting weaker.

Four of us went over to the apartment to prepare for her return. We paused as we organized her room to show one another the sublime and the ridiculous things that we found. Sublime: a letter that Lou’s dear friend had written to my mother and her siblings after Lou died, saying how much he had loved my grandfather. Ridiculous: a tiny clay pot filled with brooches shaped like sunglasses. Proustian: several bottles of White Shoulders perfume, all partially used.

Finally, Harriet came home. The most striking thing was how much she looked like her mother, whom I called Nanny Annie, who died at the age of ninety-five. Her facial structure seemed not just thinner or older but rearranged from her own; she looked exactly like Annie. I sent a photo to my cousins, who agreed that the resemblance was not just uncanny but new. None of us had seen it before. I had the strange sensation of being in a play in which an older performer replaces a younger one to show that time has passed.

The character in the bed was still Harriet, though, changed but undiminished. My sister Ella has said that our grandmother was always authentically herself, even if she was also constantly performing the role of herself, for her pleasure and ours. “That was a nightmare,” Harriet told me, referring to her time in the hospital. Her grip was stronger than I had imagined. She let me swab the dead skin off her lips and moisten her mouth with a little sponge on a stick; she let me gently wipe the gunk that had built up between her eyelashes and examine places where her skin was breaking down. “You’re a good doctor, Rach,” she said, as I helped her turn her tiny body.

She asked me to read her a draft of this essay, which I had started writing the night after we’d had the fraught conversation about the colonoscopy. We both teared up as I read, she when I mentioned my grandfather, I when I talked about her dying. She asked me to take out something I’d written that was “a secret.” But Harriet was pleased, and said she wanted the piece to be published. Over the next few days I listened to various family members sit with her, and heard her speak about the past more fulsomely than I remembered her doing before. She attended, without conscious intention, to what the palliative-care doctor Ira Byock has called the five tasks of the dying: saying I’m sorry, saying I forgive you, saying thank you, saying I love you, saying goodbye. She reminisced, and apologized for small and big things. She expressed satisfaction in the resolution of old conflicts. She said she missed my grandfather. She told everyone she loved them, and thanked us for taking care of her. When we’d try to leave her to rest, she’d hold our hands and tell us to stay. She didn’t want to miss anything.

About a week after Harriet came home, my mother called to tell me that her oxygen was low. Harriet looked weak over FaceTime. “Will I live?” she asked me, a more direct question than any she had ever posed before. “Well, not forever,” I joked. She smiled and said, “True.” She died at 2:45 A.M. the next day, holding hands with my aunt Nicki and Norma, the care worker who was spending the nights with her.

There is a current of personality in my family that extends from Harriet to her children to my sisters and cousins and me. I see it in my daughter, too. We all vibrate at a specific frequency, which we jokingly call the Life Force. We share a vigorous curiosity, a confident way of thinking, a sureness that we bring the action with us. At Harriet’s eightieth birthday party, in a private room at a chic downtown hotel, all her children and grandchildren raised their glasses and toasted her with the cry, “Big ups to the Life Force!” Everyone thought this was funny, and everyone meant it.

I have often remarked that I didn’t go into medicine to simply bear witness, but the work has a way of forcing you to do just that. Even with foresight and the most careful attention, you cannot plan on grace, or force closure; you cannot practice someone’s last words in advance. People die as they live and live as they are. Harriet didn’t intend to die at all, and yet she did so in a way that perfectly reflected her spirit and charisma. How did she manage it? To be with my immortal grandmother through her last breath made death and dying strange to me anew; in losing Harriet, I had never felt so close to her.

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The Main Lessons I Have Learned From My Grandmother

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